Walt Pfeiffer is seventy-nine years old, a retired antenna design engineer with thirty-two years at Raytheon and a ham radio habit that started when he was fourteen. Call sign W1AEP. His wife June died three years ago. Pancreatic cancer. Diagnosed in April, gone by August, after forty-six years of marriage.

The radio shack sat dark for two years. He couldn't walk into the room she'd let him take over in 1994 without hearing her absence in the silence between frequencies.

One sleepless October night, he went back in. Turned on the Kenwood. Scanned the bands. And on 14.227 megahertz, he picked up a signal that shouldn't exist. Impossibly clean. No static. A woman's voice, warm and immediate, unlike anything that propagates on twenty meters at night.

Her name is Delia Marsh. Edgewood, Cranston, Rhode Island. Call sign WA1FXL. She b ...